Cost Evaluation for Flexible-Grid Optical Networks

The Internet traffic demand has grown at a rate of approximately 45% per annum during the previous years and, according to a forecast from Cisco, a similar tendency can be expected for the near future: "Globally, Internet traffic will grow 3.8-fold from 2011 to 2016, a compound annual growth rate of 31%". In this paper, telecommunication carriers are continuously exploring new solutions to upgrade their networks in order to handle this ever increasing Internet traffic demand. Such a network upgrade usually implies additional economic efforts by the operators due to the higher CapEx (Capital Expenditures) and OpEx (Operational Expenditures) resulting from, for instance the need for new telecommunication infrastructure deployments and higher electrical power consumption.